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By Root 435 0

as Mustaine’s revenge trip on the people who had, as he saw it, betrayed him, it soon evolved, to his credit, into something more significant. Megadeth would be Mustaine’s irrefutable proof that there had always been more to him than helping furbish Metallica with a sound and musical direction; his inarguably great demonstration of his own, unique talents, not just as guitarist, of which he still saw himself as one of the best, but also as songwriter, singer, band leader, visionary, star. Or, as Dave put it to me some years later: ‘Fuck democracy. Democracy doesn’t work in a band. I had to have my own band and make music exactly the way I wanted to hear it, with no compromises to anybody else’s ego whatsoever.’

His new songs reflected his new band’s name: post-apocalyptic, wise after the fact, cynicism tinged with bitter joy. David Ellefson now describes sitting on the couch in Mustaine’s apartment when they first met, watching him ‘playing these amazingly solid rhythm parts. I mean, they were like slabs of rock. Dave was obviously not your average long-haired virtuoso guitar player.’ Two songs Mustaine sketched out for him early on – ‘Devil’s Island’ and ‘Set the World Afire’ – would later become stalwarts of the earliest Megadeth shows, although the latter would not be recorded until their third album. ‘They were monsters,’ says Ellefson. ‘They just jumped out at you. I thought, whoa, this guy’s got a whole different thing going on. This had nothing to do with what all the other “hair” bands were doing in 1983.’

The first Megadeth album, Killing is My Business…and Business is Good was not released until 1985, long after Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and several others had already made their mark. But it made up for lost time by combining the speed and fury of thrash, as gold-stamped by Metallica and Slayer, with a technical proficiency that was like nothing those other bands – the one rooted more deeply in traditional forms of telegraphed, well-played heavy metal, the other still in thrall to the Black Sabbath/Venom idea of what (black) metal should be – had yet attempted. Some detected jazz influences in the Megadeth maelstrom; others coined the term ‘technical thrash’ to describe the difference. But whatever one told Dave Mustaine his band sounded like, that’s what they were not, as far as he was concerned. Megadeth did not exist in a vacuum, though, and was built specifically to usurp not just Metallica but every other thrash band that had come along in the intervening years between Mustaine’s dismissal, although the perceived rivalry with Metallica was always at the forefront of his warp-speed vision.

‘The initial stuff we were writing was slower,’ recalled Ellefson. ‘Songs like “The Skull Beneath the Skin” and “Devil’s Island”, those were all more mid-tempo songs [but] I remember all the fans up in the Bay Area writing letters to Dave saying, “Man, I hope your stuff is faster than Metallica!”’ Says Bob Nalbandian, ‘That was the big thing at the time, who could play the fastest. All the thrash bands were competing for that title.’ When Nalbandian’s review of Kill ’Em All in The Headbanger proclaimed them as ‘one of the fastest and heaviest bands in the US’, he recalls how Slayer immediately started taking ads in the mag claiming to be the ‘Fastest and Heaviest of All US Metal Bands!’ As a result, said Ellefson, ‘I remember the next day we went to rehearsal and all the [new Megadeth] songs became speed metal songs. For us it happened overnight. It’s amazing how these fans writing letters to the band fuelled that whole thing and to a large degree it probably changed the course of our destiny. If the music just had stayed slow and mid-tempo, it would not have had the ferociousness and the furious nature that it eventually developed into.’

Even though thrash in its original incarnation – like punk and the NWOBHM before it – would be a relatively short-lived phenomenon, its influence would continue to be felt in the Bay Area and beyond for decades. A typically next-generation example are Machine Head, also from northern